‘I still feel like I’m dead and this is just the afterlife’

Idaho’s failed effort earlier this year to execute a prisoner for the first time in 12 years, stunning top officials, has again paralyzed the state’s ability to carry out the death penalty and left Thomas Creech, death row’s longest-tenured member, bracing for what may come next. Creech, 73, incarcerated for nearly 50 years for multiple murders, was strapped to a bed in the Idaho Department of Correction’s execution chamber at the maximum security prison in February. There, for about an hour, the prison system’s clandestine three-member execution team searched for a proper vein, poking him with needles attached to lethal chemicals ready to enter Creech’s body but to no avail, and state prison leadership called off his execution.

Creech still lives and breathes today. In the 31⁄2 months since Idaho’s first-ever unsuccessful lethal injection, Creech, too, remains rattled by the unprecedented experience, which had him questioning reality, he said this week in a phone interview with the Idaho Statesman. “I laid on that table and fully expected to die that day.

And actually, to be honest with you, I still feel like I’m dead and this is just the afterlife,” Creech said from the prison south of Boise. “They laid me on the table, putting needles in my arm, and the worst of everything was I looked at my wife, I seen her sitting there, total devastation and fear in her beautiful face. And I never want to see that again.

” That uncertainty of what may follow has.